Country music fearmongers in the mid-2000s had their choice of invading bêtes noires. From one direction Taylor Swift arrived, a pop-friendly ingénue with sparkling songs and a killer instinct. From another, Miranda Lambert was stomping in, full of vitriol and skepticism, an alpha answering to no beta.

Smart money would have been on Ms. Swift to set the more attractive and replicable model; applicants needed only youth, the rest could be provided by conniving adults. But the last few years have made it plain that Ms. Swift is sui generis, and that perhaps it is Ms. Lambert who’s cast a longer shadow.

As Gretchen Wilson had done a few years earlier Ms. Lambert couched tough-talk rural feminism in music that paid deep respect to country music tradition. She understood that making changes is easier when you slip in the door unnoticed.

Such is the modus operandi of Ashley Monroe’s “Like a Rose” (Warner Brothers Nashville) and Kacey Musgraves’s “Same Trailer Different Park” (Mercury Nashville), a pair of acidic and beautiful new albums that owe at least a little bit to Ms. Lambert’s durable template. Here are singer-songwriters displaying establishment bona fides by playing nice with song structure and instrumentation while making sure to articulate feelings and perspectives not often heard near Nashville’s center.

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Kacey Musgraves at the Highline Ballroom last year.CreditChad Batka for The New York Times

Even with the same goal the two take different approaches. Ms. Musgraves’s assault is full frontal. Her indictments come with names, or at least a boatload of identifying details. They’re about the enemy. Ms. Monroe’s, on the other hand, are sung into the mirror. They’re about the enemy within.

Social suffocation is a recurring theme for both. Ms. Musgraves’s “Merry Go ’Round” is a scathing indictment of the pieties of small towns: “If you ain’t got two kids by 21/You’re probably gonna die alone/Least that’s what tradition told you.” Even better is the wry “Blowin’ Smoke,” about dead-end waitresses confronting their expired aspirations:

Between the lunch and dinner rush

Kelly caught that outbound bus for Vegas

And we’re all out here talkin’ trash, makin’ bets

Lips wrapped ’round our cigarettes

She always thought she was too good to be a waitress

Ms. Musgraves has a sweet character to her sound, which allows her to deliver a cynic’s wisdom in the voice of an inquisitive child. The logical result of that is “Follow Your Arrow,” a song about embracing self-determination in the face of social disapproval — and also offering a tacit endorsement of same-sex relationships — which could be played on “Sesame Street,” it’s so cheerfully guileless.

While Ms. Musgraves uses humor and brightness to sweeten her bitter pills, Ms. Monroe serves hers raw. Two songs — “Monroe Suede” and the title track — begin with a dead father, a distracted mother and a narrator who’ll do anything to reinvent herself. In “Monroe Suede” she sings:

A third grade education won’t bring you no luck

When you’re looking for a way to get paid

Turned 14 and stole a pickup truck

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Credit(no credit)

Couldn’t make it on minimum wage

Like Ms. Musgraves, Ms. Monroe sees small towns as sets of prying eyes. (Both singers have writing credits on every song on their respective albums.) “I bet I’m the talk of this town/‘If you don’t have a ring, then he won’t settle down,’ ” she sings at the beginning of “Two Weeks Late,” adding, “And I hate to admit it, they were right/‘Cause I’m sleeping alone tonight.” On “Weed Instead of Roses” she gamely fights against behavioral claustrophobia in a relationship, and on “Used” she argues that the thing others will judge her harshly for is actually her greatest asset:

I know I’m not some brand new dress

Hanging there perfectly pressed

That never has been worn

I’ve got some buttons missing and there’s a couple stains

In places where the fabric has been torn

But in the end I’ll be worth a whole lot more

Used

On the whole Ms. Monroe’s album is more skeptical than Ms. Musgraves’s, even if Ms. Musgraves is the meaner of the two, her red flags far redder. But she also makes the most compromises.

More than half of Ms. Musgraves’s album, including several great songs, features status quo subject matter. “Back on the Map” is all sultry tragedy: “Does anybody wanna/Put me back, put me back on the map?/I’d be all about it, I’d do anything, anything that you asked.” And “It Is What It Is” will almost certainly be one of the year’s great love songs. True to its day it’s about emotionally fraught casual sex: “We’ve tried being apart/But the truth is, we are who we are”; “ ’Til something better comes along/’Til whatever we have is gone.” (The irksome “My House,” about a mobile home, has no place on this album and smacks of pandering, and even the optimistic arrangement of “Step Off” can’t cloak its flimsiness.)

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CreditMercury Nashville , via Associated Press

When Ms. Monroe veers from her dark script, she toys with style as much as theme. The heart-rending lament “She’s Driving Me Out of Your Mind” is done in the creamy throwback style perfected several years back by Lee Ann Womack, and the high-stepping “You Ain’t Dolly (And You Ain’t Porter),” sung with Blake Shelton, is a throwback to glitzy country of several decades ago.

On both of these albums the musical cues are used as comfort points. Ms. Musgraves — she produced the album with Luke Laird and Shane McAnally — touches on rockabilly, blues-rock, country-folk and harmonica jamming. At times nothing is louder than the banjo, in case anyone had a litmus test prepared.

For Ms. Monroe working with the unimpeachable traditionalist Vince Gill (who produced the album with Justin Niebank) lets her move under the cover of stealth. There’s not likely to be a more earthy feeling and backward-sounding country album released on a major label this year. That complements Ms. Monroe’s voice, which can slip into a semiyodel with ease.

It’s notable, the degree to which both women play ball, or at least believe in country music enough to want to adhere to its core musical principles, even while rewiring the words. That this movement is happening as the genre continues to suffer from its masculinity crisis is no coincidence: as male singers have left the genre’s increasingly dull assumptions unchecked, they’ve given women room and reason to innovate.

Loretta Lynn, Dolly Parton, Reba McEntire, Ms. Lambert, Ms. Wilson: the legacy they’re channeling is strong. There’s also a new Pistol Annies album due in May. (Ms. Monroe is a member of this group, along with Ms. Lambert and Angaleena Presley.) Even the rigid-backboned Carrie Underwood has gotten in on the action; “Two Black Cadillacs,” a dark stunner about revenge from her most recent album, just became her 17th No. 1 country hit.

All storms peter out, though. Ms. Wilson and, to a degree, Ms. Lambert both presented as rebels but quickly evolved into preservers of the realm. Even Ms. Swift, as she leans more pop, becomes even more important to country. Ms. Musgraves and Ms. Monroe could easily shelve their concerns and live comfortably at the genre’s center, but continuing to be the change that they sing about will be the bigger accomplishment.